November 5, 2021
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Whether you’re a business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) brand, Black Friday and Cyber Monday provide great opportunities for you to connect with consumers and drive incremental sales leading up to the end of the year. With that said, when you’re sending email marketing campaigns to cannabis license holders, there are some unique things to consider, which can increase your chances of success.
When it comes to Black Friday and Cyber Monday email marketing, it’s important to follow a process that has been proven to lead to success:
Your holiday campaigns must do the three things listed above, or they’ll fail. Building excitement, tapping into the fear of missing out (FOMO) and other emotional triggers, establishing a finite timeframe to act within, and proving that by acting, your audience will get something that is truly worthwhile are all critical to generating engagement and conversions in Black Friday and Cyber Monday email marketing initiatives.
Before you start writing and sending email campaigns for Black Friday or Cyber Monday, you need to do some prep work and planning. Specifically, there are several key steps you should follow to ensure your campaigns are optimized to deliver the best results.
In some cases, if you don’t follow these steps, your Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns could hurt your email deliverability in the future, so don’t skip the steps! Let’s take a closer look at each one.
If you’re using your own domain to send your email marketing messages and you plan to increase the frequency or volume of campaigns you send during the holidays, then you should definitely warm up your domain first.
The reason to do a domain warmup is simple. Email service providers (ESPs) – like Google, Outlook, Apple, and so on – use your sending history to determine whether or not you’re sending messages people actually want or you’re sending spammy, unwanted messages. If you’ve been consistently sending a certain number of messages on a consistent schedule for months and suddenly, you send a bunch of messages to larger lists or on an erratic schedule, that unusual behavior could be misinterpreted by ESPs as spam.
Therefore, start building up your sending frequency and volume (depending on your holiday email marketing plans) so your ramped up sending patterns don’t look out of character for you. For example, you could increase your volume and frequency every week or every few days leading up to your holiday email push.
You don’t want your holiday messages to go to spam folders simply because you didn’t warm up your domain and “warn” ESPs that you’ll be sending more often and to larger lists. Take your time. Don’t send to more than double the number of recipients you sent to in your previous email marketing campaign to protect your domain reputation.
As you know, ESPs view a lack of recipient engagement with your messages as a sign that you’re not sending content people want, and it could hurt the future deliverability of your email campaigns. With that in mind, monitor recipient engagement with your holiday messages closely and adjust your mailing schedule as needed to ensure your messages keep going to inboxes.
Who do you want to connect with, and who is most likely to be interested in your Black Friday and Cyber Monday messages and offers? It’s imperative that you create buyer personas and segment your lists effectively to get the best results for your campaigns (and stay out of the spam folder).
The key to email marketing success at any time during the year is to send the most relevant messages possible to the right audiences. To do it, you need to create small, segmented lists and send personalized, hyper-relevant content to the people on those small lists.
Whatever you do, never send generic messages to bulk lists. Doing so is a ticket to a bad domain reputation and the spam folder.
Email inboxes are bombarded with messages during the holidays, so to stand out from the clutter, you need to send messages and offers that deliver more value than any other time of year. People expect more value, big discounts, and so on during the holidays, so be strategic and make sure your messages and offers excite your recipients rather than bore them.
There are two pieces to this puzzle: creating offers that each target audience wants and writing message copy that answers the question, “What’s in it for me? (WIIFM?).” In fact, this is one of my top three copywriting tips for email marketing.
Every email marketing campaign you send should answer the specific target audience’s question, “What’s in it for me?” (WIIFM?). You must clearly and succinctly tell recipients what’s in it for them if they take the time to open and read your message, or they won’t take the time to do so. That means your copy needs to focus on what’s important to them, not to you.
Each target audience likely has different problems, pain points, and needs that your products or services can help them solve. Your email marketing messages should give them something of value and show them how your offer can help them. You do that by answering WIIFM? in the message subject line, first sentence, first paragraph, second paragraph, call-to-action, and so on.
Always consider your recipients’ schedules when you’re mailing to B2B audiences during the holidays. For example, if you’re sending messages to cannabis license holders through the email marketing tool in the Cannabiz Media License Database, will they be working and actively checking their email inboxes on Black Friday and Cyber Monday? If not, you need to get creative with your email campaigns.
Consider promoting Black Friday Week and Cyber Monday Week to ensure you have a chance to connect with people when they’re working and are more likely to see your messages. With this strategy, you’ll need to spread out your email marketing schedule throughout the month of November rather than focus your mailing schedule on just a few days or a single week during the month.
No matter how many days or weeks you schedule messages, you need to include content in your messages that follows four phases in order for your Black Friday and Cyber Monday email marketing to be successful. Those four phases are:
Specifically, you need to tease your special Black Friday and Cyber Monday offers early to start building anticipation and continue to build excitement in your coming soon messages. When Black Friday or Cyber Monday arrive, create a sense of urgency with now/hurry and last chance messages.
Considering when B2B recipients will be working and looking at their business email messages is just one part of determining when to send your holiday campaigns. You also need to consider your full mailing schedule and the optimal days of the week and time of day to send each campaign.
To choose the best days and times to send your messages, use the Best Time of Day heat map in the Cannabiz Media License Database to find the day and time when the campaigns you’ve sent in the past have gotten the most engagement. As shown in the image below, the best times and days to send messages for this sender are displayed in dark blue.
Cannabiz Media’s client-specific heat map tool is extremely useful to ensure your messages have the highest chance of being seen, opened, and read.
If you use the tips introduced in this article, follow the four schedule phases to increase anticipation and urgency, and send highly relevant messages that recipients believe are valuable to them (i.e., you segment your lists well and personalize the content of your messages for each audience segment), you should get high engagement and results from your Black Friday and Cyber Monday email marketing campaigns.
Originally published 11/3/20. Updated 11/5/21.
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